CS:GO has remained one of the most popular and competitive first person shooters since its launch back in 2012.

I’ve poured a few thousand hours into the timeless classic myself, playing nearly every day after school.

The game is all about multiplayer gameplay, especially in the competitive world - however, that’s not all the game has to offer.

CS:GO has a ton of different game types, from surfing and BHOP to 1v1 battles and zombie escape.

There are public servers run by Valve both for competitive and casual play, but they’re not customizable nor are they high performance. Most competitive players want 128-tick servers by default, but they’re currently 64-tick (more on that below).

Alternatively, there are CS:GO community servers, run by gamers, for gamers.

Whether you want to host a high performance server to practice with your competitive team, or you want to host a custom game and grow a community, CS:GO server hosting is the solution.

Popular CS:GO Hosting Companies

Paying for CS:GO Hosting vs. Hosting Yourself

Do you actually have to pay for CS:GO hosting?

Well, technically, the answer is no - you could host your own CS:GO dedicated server. But it’s definitely not ideal, especially if you want to host a server for competitive practice, or to grow a serious community.

CS:GO is one of the most competitive games first person shooters on Steam, with the largest concurrent player base at the time of writing.

A game like Terraria or modded Minecraft isn’t a high stakes game. You can host a Terraria server for you and a few friends without needing to worry about performance.

CS:GO, on the other hand, is another story.

Top notch server performance is essential when a high stakes tournament can be decided in a split second. That’s why CS:GO requires dedicated servers from a professional host.

Hosting a server yourself will cause performance and uptime issues that you won’t run into if you’re paying for hosting.

How Much Does it Cost to Host a CS:GO Server?

Generally speaking, CS:GO hosting is cheap, ranging from $5 per month to $50 per month, depending on the hosting company, server hardware, and most importantly, slot count.

If you’re hosting a small ten slot server for 5v5 team scrimmage games, you’ll probably want to pay extra for the fastest servers available, but it won’t be too bad because you’re only using ten slots.

If you want to save money, DatHost only charges you when you’re playing. You can turn the server off and you won’t be charged for using it, unless you reach the maximum monthly usage, at which point you won’t pay more than the monthly maximum.

DatHost is probably the best cheap CS:GO server hosting company for teams who play less than 30 hours a month, since you’re only paying by the hour.

But if you plan on gaming more than that or want to host another type of community server, there are other options out there. Companies like Host Havoc and PingPerfect charge flat monthly fees regardless of usage, but they’re generally lower prices per slot than DatHost.

All in all, CS:GO server hosting cost depends on what you want to do with the server. Small servers used infrequently with friends or teammates may be cheaper than large servers running 24/7 for minigames like surfing or BHOP.

Best CS:GO Server Hosting

GameServers

Hosting Provider

GameServers is is one of the oldest hosting companies around today. They have served over 500,000 customers since 2004, including Infinity Ward (COD: Modern Warfare), Treyarch (COD: Black Ops) and more.

GameServers CS:GO hosting comes with free location switching, mod support, and DDoS protection. They have a custom control panel and FTP for those who want to mess with the game files, as well as FastDL support (more on that below).

Their CS:GO hosting is fairly expensive, coming in at $0.79/slot for private servers and $0.99 a slot for public servers.

They also have a minimum slot count of twelve players, which is a bit high. Their minimum monthly payment for a twelve slot server is $9.55, and $11.95 for a public one.

The company is highly recommended by the CS:GO community for their great performance, but it comes at a cost.

GameServers doesn’t have a CS:GO knowledgebase on their site oddly enough, so you’ll need to rely primarily on their 24/7 customer support.

Host Havoc is one of my favorite hosting companies - you’ll learn why in my Host Havoc review. Their customer service is on point and their servers are fast, not to mention reasonably priced. Can you ask more from a hosting company?

Their CS:GO servers are a modest $0.50 per slot, nearly half that of GameServers. Host Havoc also offers one click mod support for CS:GO, making it easy to change your server’s game mode on the fly.

I chose Host Havoc as the best CS:GO server host for plugins because of their great mod support, comprehensive knowledgebase, and terrific support team.

There is one drawback here though - Host Havoc has a high minimum slot count requirement for their CS:GO servers. You have to purchase at least 20 slots, which means the minimum monthly payment is $10 per month.

While you’ll need at least 20 slots for a large community server, it doesn’t make sense to choose Host Havoc for a 5v5 scrimmage server. More on that below.

However, if you’re looking for a reliable CS:GO hosting provider for mods, plugins, and custom games, Host Havoc has your back.

Cheap CS:GO Server Hosting

PingPerfect

Game Servers

Not only do they have great servers and an awesome control panel, they also have an amazing support team. Their responsiveness and helpfulness absolutely blew me away, especially when compared to the other companies on this list.

If the average competitive match lasts an hour, you can play ten matches on a high performance server for less than $5, or twenty matches for lesst than $10.

Once you reach the maximum monthly price, you won’t pay more than the upper threshold of approximately $10.77 per month. Oh, and they offer a free trial of their service too.

It’s nice that they won’t keep charging you, but if you’re going to use the server that much, it makes more sense to use one of the hosts above that charge a cheaper flat fee.

But if you only want to host a few games here and there throughout the month and don’t want to pay for a server that’s continuously running, DatHost is the move.

CS:GO Server Hosting Free

There are a few ‘free’ CS:GO hosting services than run on donations, but they’re all trash (I’ve tested them myself).

If you’re serious about hosting a server, you should pay for one. However, if you just want to host a small server for you and your friends and you’re not concerned about performance, you can host one yourself.

Setting up a CS:GO dedicated server is actually pretty easy - follow the steps on this official Valve page to get started.

How to Choose CS:GO Server Hosting

If you want to learn everything there is to know about choosing a good hosting company, click that link to check out the full guide.

In this section, I’m going over two aspects specific to CS:GO hosting.

Let’s dive in:

FastDL

Games that run on the Source engine like CS:GO, Garry’s Mod, and TF2 allow for custom game types, maps, scripts, and more. If you want to fully utilize the flexibility of the Source engine, using FastDL is recommended.

FastDL stands for Fast Download. FastDL is the method of using a HTTP server for file hosting used with "sv_downloadurl" in source game servers to allow players to quickly download files such as maps for use on your server.

Server Tickrate

The tickrate of your server is incredibly important if you’re a competitive player, but not that big a deal for everyone else.

What is the server’s tickrate, exactly?

Here’s an explanation according to a member of the CS:GO community petitioning for higher tick competitive servers:

Tickrate is the rate, at which the server can "see" things which change.
That means on 64 Tick Server that 1 second reallife is 64 ticks. That means that all calculations are barely done 64 times per second. It has nothing to do with your monitor or other things.
On 128 tick, 1 second is split into 128 different "snapshots". That means that all things, like shooting, bullet reg, position is more accurate. It is right, that you dont have the advantage of the accurate position if you have less than 128 fps. But you get more accurate shots, due to the maximized snapshots.

You can think of tickrate like the refresh rate of your monitor. A 144Hz monitor refreshes 144 times per second, whereas a 60Hz monitor only refreshes 60 times per second.

Similarly, the tickrate of a CS:GO server measures how many time the server refreshes each second. A higher tickrate means more accurate calculations.

This isn’t a big deal whatsoever if you’re surfing or playing BHOP, but in a heated competitive match, tickrate makes all the difference.

Higher tickrate servers tend to be more expensive per slot, but you don’t need to buy a ton of slots for competitive play, so price - more or less - evens out.

Private vs. Public Servers

There are two types of CS:GO community servers:

Private servers

Public servers

It’s pretty self explanatory - private servers can only be accessed by your friends with login information, and public servers are available to anyone browsing in the ‘community servers’ section of the game.

Most hosting companies charge more for public servers - if you don’t plan on having strangers join, make sure to choose private hosting instead.

CS:GO Custom Servers

Here are some of the most common CS:GO community server types in the game:

Team Scrims

If you want to become a competitive CS:GO player or are already on a team, setting up a private server is great for practice.

Team scrims are one of the best way to improve your game. If you’re hosting a server for team scrims, you probably won’t need more than 10-12 slots for the server.

But since you’re using the server for competitive purposes, the importance of its high performance cannot be overstated. Professional CS:GO players use 128 tick servers, which can be more expensive than 64 tick servers.

Don’t pay for a cheap hosting service and regret it in the future - performance is the name of the game when it comes to competitive CS:GO matches, and you don’t want to regret your decision with lag.

Sure, 128 tick servers are more expensive, but you get what you pay for. And they’re not even that expensive in the grand scheme of things. Since 10-12 slots is a relatively low amount, you won’t need to pay an arm and a leg for a 60 person slot server, which would be more expensive even without 128 tick performance.

Surfing

Surfing is one of my favorite community games in CS:GO, and other Source games for that matter, like TF2.

There’s something about surfing that’s challenging yet relaxing, especially with a beer and some chill music.

Surfing servers tend to have a lot of players and are running throughout the day and night, meaning you’ll need to pay for a monthly server rental. DatHost, which is advantageous if you only want to rent for several hours, isn’t a great option here in terms of bang for your buck.

Renting a CS:GO surf server may be a bit pricier because you’ll most likely want a higher slot count to accomodate more players, which will raise your monthly bill.

Fortunately, since surfing doesn’t require as much performance as a competitive scrim server, you won’t need to pay extra for a 128 tick high performance server or extra CPU priority.

BHOP

Bunny Hop, or BHOP for short, is another popular CS:GO community server type. You essentially use the mechanics of the game to hop around maps like a bunny.

It’s hard to explain if you’ve never played CS:GO before. If you jump at the right time, over and over again, your character won’t lose momentum and you can hop around the map, jumping over obstacles and seeing how fast you can go.

Learning how to BHOP may seem challenging, but it’s actually pretty easy. Check out that guide for a detailed explanation.

Mini Games

There are a number of other CS:GO server types, too many to talk about in detail in this post.